‘It’s for you,’ Christopher said. ‘To take to Colombo.’
Slowly she opened the box.
‘Yes,’ said a hollow voice from within. ‘Hello, men.’
Then with a sharp rustle a small, bright-eyed mynah bird flew out and around the room, coming to rest on the grandfather clock, from where it surveyed them with interest. There was a shocked silence.
‘It’s a mynah bird,’ said Christopher unnecessarily. ‘And it can talk. We can teach it all kinds of things. It can say lazy boy, and –’
‘Lazy bugger,’ said the mynah bird, gazing at them solemnly.
‘Good God, Christopher!’ cried Aloysius, recovering first. He burst out laughing. ‘What a present to give your mother!’
They were all laughing now. The servant boy was grinning, and even Jacob was smiling.
‘But he’s wonderful,’ said Grace, laughing the most. ‘He’s a wonderful present!’
Later on she said, to Christopher’s intense joy: ‘I shall call him Jasper! And we’ll take him to our new life in Colombo.’
It was in this way that Grace de Silva dealt with their reduced family circumstance. Easily, without fuss, without a single word in public of reproach to her husband and with all the serene good manners that were the hallmark of her character. Aloysius breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever she felt, she would now keep to herself he knew. Outwardly, she would appear no different. And so, as the rumours of impending war on the island grew stronger, the house beside the lake with all its balconies and splendid rooms was emptied. Its furniture and chandeliers, its delicate bone china were packed away, and even as they watched, their beloved home was closed forever and given up to the British for their military efforts. In this way the de Silva family, cast out from the cradle where they had lived for so long, moved south to Colombo. To a white house with a sweeping veranda, close by the railway line where the humidity was very often oppressive, but where the sweet, soft sound of the Indian Ocean was never far away.
AUGUST WAS A DANGEROUS MONTH, when the heat, reaching unbearable proportions, created an oasis of stillness. Every flutter, every breeze, vanished, leaving an eerie calm. Nothing moved. Dogs stretched out on the dusty roads panting, too exhausted to move out of the shade, too parched to bark even. Dust lay tiredly on everything, on buildings, on the soles of the feet of the rickshaw men, on the sides of the old London double-decker buses. Disease scurried through the sun-crisped grass; some said there was typhoid in the south, others that the malaria season had begun. No one knew the truth. A pack of rabid dogs moved up the coast at a trot, and elsewhere in the crowds at Galle Face, baby-pink, raw-faced monkeys chattered and sometimes bit a passer-by. But this was August, when sanity was stretched to its limits.
Four years had vanished in the blink of an eye. Swallowed up beneath a peacock sky while the de Silvas grew and expanded into their new life by the sea. Five de Silva childhoods gone in a flash while the war still limped on unnoticed. It existed in places that were merely names on a map. Vichy, Paris, Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, London. But the hardships in these distant lands barely touched the fringes of the coral-ringed island. The war was a muffled drum, beating elsewhere and leaving the island largely untouched and unconcerned. Grace de Silva hurrying home after one of her trips to Colombo heard the familiar strains of piano music drifting through the long French windows that opened out into the garden. The music cascaded out onto the bougainvillea and was absorbed by it. As she slipped in through the front door, escaping the wall of blistering sunlight, the music rose and swelled and fell delicately. Jasper, the mynah bird who sat by the meshed window in the wide cool hallway, watched her beadily. He had grown enormously.
‘Hello,’ he greeted her. ‘Hello, men,’ and he shifted on his perch.
Grace, who had been trying to be quiet, giggled.
‘Good morning,’ continued Jasper severely. ‘Good morning, men.’
Having been silent and alone all day he found it difficult to stop talking. Grace looked away, suppressing a smile. She kicked off her shoes, ignoring him. Any attention, she knew, was likely to make him garrulous. She poured a glass of icy water from the fridge, gasping as she drank.
The sound of the piano drifted through the interior of the house. It travelled softly across the shuttered rooms and along the yellow stick of light that escaped through them. Alicia was playing the second movement of a Mozart sonata with startling tenderness in one so young. Grace stood listening, holding her breath, waiting as though hearing it for the first time. On and on and on played her eldest daughter in an unbroken dialogue with the music. The notes ran like quicksilver through her fingers. Grace closed her eyes. Her body ached sweetly. Without a doubt, she thought, distracted by the music, Alicia ought to be studying at the Conservatoire. But she knew discussing the financial implications of this with Aloysius was an impossibility. Better to give a monkey a ladder, thought Grace wryly. All she would do if she voiced her anxieties was provide him with an excuse to start his poker up again. No, she decided closing her eyes, I will have to find the money. There was still some of her legacy left that Aloysius knew nothing about. Grace had hoped to keep it for a rainy day. She frowned.
‘Perhaps I shall have to sell the land after all,’ she said out loud.
‘Yes,’ said Jasper as though he understood.
‘Do you think so?’ asked Grace absent-mindedly, forgetting for a moment who he was.
‘Hello, yes, yes, men,’ said Jasper imperiously, preening himself and ignoring Grace’s peal of laughter. Then he squawked flatly and turned his back on her.
Outside, the air was heavy with the smells of late afternoon. The servants were cleaning out the clay pots from lunch, laying them out in the sun to dry. The heat flattened the noises all around into slow hollow slaps as the convent clock struck the hour in a strange flat monotone. Grace paused in the darkened room listening to these unfamiliar southern noises, of crows cawing and bicycle bells. She listened to the lilting sound of the Beethoven study Alicia was now playing. It was interspersed with her husband’s drunken snores in the next room. While the steady ticking of the metronome drew and fused all of it, weaving this fleeting moment in time forever. Grace sighed with pleasure. In spite of the difficulty, her family had made the transition into their new life with ease. Their circumstances had been reduced, but they were happy. The freedom of the big city and the unbroken views of the sea had made up for a lot. She poured herself another glass of water.
Myrtle Cruz, hearing the front door, sat up in bed. She had been resting. The heat in Colombo was intolerable. She missed the cool greenness of the hill station where she had been a governess to the British family. She missed the order and calm of the English children she had taught.
‘This place is a madhouse,’ muttered Myrtle, switching off the fan and getting out of bed.
The English family had long gone. And this, thought Myrtle, this is my karma. She disliked her cousin Grace. It had happened long ago when they had been young, when Myrtle had first met the new estate manager at her uncle’s factory. He had been penniless but handsome and ambitious, often invited to dine at the House of Many Balconies. In those distant, halcyon